Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (55 page)

‘Nicht so viel schreien, Fisch!
’ I scolded him. ‘
Die anderen sind auch krank, nicht Sie allein!’

But I felt quite melancholy when I came on duty one morning to learn that he had died in the night.

There was no time, however, for regrets, since I had to spend half that day sitting beside a small, middle-aged Bavarian who was slowly bleeding to death from the subclavian artery. The hæmorrhage was too deep-seated to be checked, and Hope Milroy went vehemently through the dressings with her petrified cavalcade of orderlies while I gave the dying man water, and wiped the perspiration from his face. On the other side of the bed a German-speaking Nonconformist padre murmured the Lord’s Prayer; the sombre resonance of its conclusion sounded like the rolling of some distant organ:

‘
Und vergieb uns unsere Schulden, wie wir unsern Schuldigern vergeben. Und führe uns nicht in Versuchung, sondern erlöse uns von dem Übel. Denn Dein ist das Reich und die Kraft und die Herrlichkeit in Ewigkeit, Amen.’

But the dying patient was not much interested in the forgiveness of his sins; the evil from which neither friends nor enemies could deliver him prevailed all too obviously.

‘
Schwester, liebe Schwester!
’ he whispered, clutching at my hand. ‘
Ich bin schwach - so schwach!’

When I came back from luncheon he too had died, and Hope Milroy was sitting exhausted at the table.

‘I’ve just laid that man out,’ she said; ‘and now I want some tea. I don’t care about watching a man bleed to death under my very eyes, even if he is a Hun.’

Before making the tea, I went behind the screens to take a last look at the wax doll on the bed. Now that the lids had closed over the anxious, pleading eyes, the small bearded face was devoid of expression. The window above the body happened to be closed, and Hope called to me to open it.

‘I always open the windows when they die - so as to let their souls go out,’ she explained.

Plenty of fresh air was, of course, desirable for many other reasons. September that year was as hot and damp as August had been, and after several weeks in an atmosphere heavy with sepsis, we were both suffering from an uncomfortable variety of those inconveniences known to hospitals as ‘d. and v.’ which we called ‘Étaplitis’.

Such was my life in the German ward. In the middle of September it ended abruptly with a bewildering rumpus, of which I appeared to be the victim rather than the culprit. Although I had been two years with the Army, I was still very innocent; I may be mistaken in supposing that I am less so now, but I am no more certain to-day than I was then of the reason for my sudden transfer to an English surgical ward.

Amongst the prisoners was a twenty-two-year-old medical student whom we called Alfred; he often helped with the operations, and being a natural intriguer, was apt to gossip and cause trouble. One morning I discovered Hope Milroy involved in an acrimonious dispute with both him and the M.O.; all day she strenuously kept me out of the theatre, and after tea I found myself, unaccountably, in the Matron’s office.

‘I’m very sorry indeed, nurse, that you’ve been so much annoyed by that dreadful man,’ the Matron amazingly began. ‘I do hope it hasn’t upset you very much. I’ve arranged for you to go to another ward to-morrow morning.’

Completely unaware whether the ‘dreadful man’ was Alfred or the M.O., and entirely ignorant of what the one or the other was supposed to have done, I protested quite truthfully that I had not been annoyed at all, that I liked my work in the German ward, and would much rather remain there than be moved. But this, I was told, kindly but very definitely, was out of the question. I still wonder whether the whole upset was not a figment of Hope Milroy’s picturesque imagination - or whether some unperceived menace was really threatening my guileless head.

6

Off duty in France, I was less lonely than I had been in either London or Malta. Since I was not new to active service, the agreeable staff of 24 General treated me as a ‘veteran’ like themselves, and I had a pleasant choice of companions on country walks or shopping expeditions to Paris-Plage.

The area, too, as I came to know it better, seemed anything but the mere dust-heap that it had appeared to me on my journey from Malta. I remember mornings when exiguous wraiths of cloud scudded unsubstantially over the sandhills, crowned always by their tall clumps of thin, dark pines; and afternoons in which the blue shadows lengthened across the vast expanse of coast where the estuary met the distant sea. Towards Paris-Plage the ruddy sails of brown fishing-smacks caught the brief flame of sunset; along the shore irregular patches of emerald seaweed made a futurist pattern upon a golden-brown carpet. Close to the sea a delicate scattering of pink and purple shells began a new design; other cone-shaped varieties, curiously striped in black and yellow, might have been miniature models of the fashionable millinery in the Rue de la Paix.

No seascape in England quite resembles that coast, but the three miles of Romney Marsh between Rye and the sandhill-guarded shore of Camber-on-Sea have at least a family likeness. The same vivid light, due to the perpetual sweeping away of the mists by the wind, lies upon the Marsh and the flat water-logged meadows on either side of the white sentinel road running from Etaples to the woods surrounding Le Touquet. In summer and autumn this light becomes golden-yellow, but in winter it is always a dazzling green.

Along that straight road, Hope Milroy and I walked together one late evening in early September. So close a companionship between a Sister and a V.A.D. would have been frowned upon severely by the portentous Territorials at the 1st London General, but in France, though necessary discipline was maintained in the wards, the Q. A. Reserve Sisters had no such feeling of professional exclusiveness towards the girls who had helped them to fight so many forms of death since almost the beginning of the War. I had had a bitter disappointment that week, for Edward had put in for local leave to come and see me, but though I waited expectantly about the camp for two or three days, he never appeared. To divert my mind from gloomy speculations as to why leave was unobtainable, Hope invited me to one of those stray meals by means of which the insistent appetite of wartime could sometimes successfully challenge a disconsolate mood.

As we crossed the bridge which spanned the river Canche just before it branched into its shallow estuary, we saw two medical officers from 24 General walking a hundred yards in front of us, with backs stiff and shoulders hunched, pretending not to know that we were behind them.

‘They’re going Paris-Plaging,’ observed Hope dispassionately; it was a euphemism that we both understood. Like most of us she suffered from the strained atmosphere created by segregation, but she was among the few who despised surreptitious breaches of a rule that she could not alter. It made the men so conceited, she said, to think themselves worth any amount of risk to women who stood the chance of dismissal while they would get off scot-free whatever happened.

That evening, deep in the woods, we drank coffee and ate omelettes in a cottage garden carved out of a sunlit clearing. The tall, intertwined trees cast their growing shadows over us, and the evening sunlight, glancing through the boughs, made a quivering leafy pattern on the grass. Columbines and pansies framed the narrow garden path with pink and purple borders; the scent from a bush of sweetbriar in the corner hung like the lightest incense upon the quiet air. It seemed impossible that this untouched serenity and the German ward could exist within a few miles of each other; except for the occasional soft thumping of anti-aircraft guns at a distant gunnery school, the War had disappeared. From the depths of the wood a feathery line of blue smoke curled lazily upward; some peasants were making a fire of dry sticks, which recalled to my senses the friendly smell of a thousand bonfires that drifts across England in the early autumn. A verse from Thomas Hardy’s ‘In Time of the Breaking of Nations’ floated into my mind from the volume of his poems that Edward had sent me in Malta:

Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch grass:
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.

We sat in the garden till twilight, talking about Oxford, and Hope’s reaction against the academic traditions of her family. By the time that we reached the village again, long indigo shadows lay dark upon the fields, and the harvest moon hung like a Chinese lantern in the pale green sky.

7

Through my new surgical hut in the ‘front line’ of the hospital passed a ceaseless stream of Tommies from the Salient. The ward was less of a strain than the German ward only because it was more adequately staffed; my letters home tell the same story of perpetual convoys, of hæmorrhages, of delirium, of gas-gangrene cases doomed from the start who watched our movements with staring, fear-darkened eyes, afraid to ask the questions whose answers would confirm that which they already knew.

By the time that the new Battle of Ypres had blundered round those costly ridges for six unbroken weeks the whole staff of 24 General was jaded, and in spite of Passchendaele the Matron insisted upon the temporary re-establishment of ‘days off’. I spent mine with one of the senior V.A.D.s, who had been in France since 1915: at twenty-six, Norah had made up her mind that intellectual pretensions were not for her, but a large endowment of humorous common sense made her a pleasing companion for the sixteen-mile walk to Hardelot and back which proved the fatigue of the past weeks to have been nervous rather than physical.

I was now quite hardened to living and working on my feet; only a very exceptional ‘push’ made bones and muscles ache as they had ached after the Somme. As for the wounds, I was growing accustomed to them; most of us, at that stage, possessed a kind of psychological shutter which we firmly closed down upon our recollection of the daily agony whenever there was time to think. We never dreamed that, in the years of renewed sensitiveness after the War, the convenient shutter would simply refuse to operate, or even to allow us to romanticise - as I who tried to write poetry romanticised in 1917 - the everlasting dirt and gruesomeness.

‘Have just been writing a poem on the German ward,’ I told my mother on September 15th; ‘was composing it this morning while watching a patient who was rather sick come round from an operation.’

The poem was published later in
Verses of a V.A.D
. As anyone who can visualise the circumstances of its composition will imagine, it was not a good poem, and would not be worth mentioning but for the fact that it produced a letter of congratulation from Lady Ampthill - who had succeeded Dame Katharine Furse as Chairman of the Joint Women’s V.A.D. Committee - on its irreproachable sentiments. The sentiments were, of course, irreproachable only from the standpoint of a society whose motto was ‘
Inter Arma Caritas
’; that first flicker of genuine if slightly patronising internationalism would hardly have commended itself to the ‘Fight to a Finish’ enthusiasts.

Beneath the drifting clouds of a warm September morning, Norah and I walked through sandhills and meadows and pinewoods on our way to Hardelot. At a searchlight depot on a lonely hillside two Tommies hailed us with delight when we asked them thirstily for water; they said they had not seen an English woman for over three months. We arrived at Hardelot a little before lunchtime; after hesitating outside the Pre Catalan, an old château with a beautiful garden which had been converted into an expensive restaurant ‘for officers and nurses’, we decided that it would be cheaper, if not quite so pleasant, to eat at the small hotel at Hardelot-Plage.

So we went on for the extra mile, and were about to order a meal in the hotel salon, when a car drove up and an Australian officer stalked through the door with a Q. A. Reserve Sister sidling in behind him. The officer had begun to make some inquiries in very bad French about a room for the night when he noticed Norah and me. He turned and glared at us with a degree of malevolence that I have seldom seen on any human countenance; the worst language in the world could not have told us more plainly how unutterably
de trop
we were.

Norah and I concluded that if the Sister liked to spend part of her leave in this manner it was no business of ours; we rather deplored her choice of officer, but perhaps the selection was limited. The hotel, we decided, was obviously not large enough to hold both ourselves and them, so we walked back again to Hardelot, and lunched in sylvan chastity at the Pré Catalan.

The incident made a good tale to tell over the supper-party that we held in Norah’s hut when we got back. Those evening parties - not so dissimilar from the cocoa-drinkings at Oxford, except that instead of essays and dons and Napoleon we discussed operations and Sisters and lumbar punctures - made life in France much more sociable than in Camberwell or Malta, where we had never forgathered in the same way. At Etaples the supervision in ‘quarters’ was slight and infrequent; the privacy of the V.A.D.s was respected and they were credited with responsible behaviour off duty as well as on - a policy which made for good discipline, though in English hospitals no one appeared to understand this elementary fact of psychology.

8

I returned to my ward for another six weeks without a half day - a deprivation due not only to the perpetual rush of operations and dressings, but to the local mutiny afterwards described by the men as the ‘Battle of Eetapps’. At the time, this somewhat disreputable interruption to a Holy War was wrapped in a fog which the years have deepened, for we were not allowed to mention it in our letters home, and it appears, not unnaturally, to have been omitted from standard histories by their patriotic authors.
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